When writing Literary Arabic in full diacritics, there are three nunation diacritics, which indicate the suffixes '
(IPA: /-un/) (nominative case), ' /-in/ (
genitive), and '
/an/ (accusative). The orthographical rules for nunation with the sign is by an additional ' (, diacritic above alif; or , diacritic before alif; see below), above (''Ta' marbuta|
) or above (hamza|'' ). In most dialects of
spoken Arabic, nunation only exists in words and phrases borrowed from the literary language, especially those that are declined in the accusative (that is, with ). It is still used in some
Bedouin dialects in its genitive form , such as in
Najdi Arabic. Since Arabic has no
indefinite article, nouns that are nunated (except for proper nouns) are indefinite, and so the absence of the definite article triggers nunation in all nouns and substantives except diptotes (that is, derivations with only two cases in the indefinite state, -u in the nominative and -a in the accusative and genitive). A given name, if it is not a diptote, is also nunated when declined, as in ('
"I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah."), in which the word ', a given name derived from the passive participle of ("to praise"), is nunated to to signal that it is in the accusative case, as it is the grammatical subject of a sentence introduced by ("that"). In Levantine Arabic, it is standard to write on the , rather than on the previous letter: ==Xiao'erjing==